Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present Together We’re Heavy an exhibition of recently completed drawings and paintings by Sherman Sam. This marks the gallery’s second exhibition with the artist, and the artist’s first solo presentation in London.

For the past two decades, Sam has become known for abstract oil paintings and drawings that avoid facile explanations or recognisable visual associations. Instead, Sam uses colour, surface, light and intuition to create a textured abstract visual reality, “free from ideology”. There is no specificity, no place, no person. The work opposes typically Western notions of narrative structure altogether. At the same time, Sam takes his titles from song lyrics — Just a perfect day, Disco Heaven, Only move to the beat — however, this is just a testament to the artist’s playful nature. The titles trick the viewer into searching for a correlation between lyric and painting that does not exist, but this unreturned quest, when abandoned, leaves room for meditation. The work exists solely on its strength as art, allowing for a more liberated experience.

The exhibition takes its title from the 2004 album Together We’re Heavy by Polyphonic Spree. The musical references, though not directly related to the series of paintings and drawings, function as found objects. While the paintings are silent, the music brings a verbal and cultural history that pertains more to what Sam was listening to in a particular moment — when Lou Reed died, for example. The resulting compositions are not unlike musical scores. Much like the ambient sounds of Polyphonic Spree, the works, in themselves, are polyphonic, echoing beyond the frame. Each particular mark on a drawing is attached to a motion, which seems to extend well past the page. For Sam, the process is organic, and could be related to the Japanese philosophy Wabi-Sabi, with its embrace of transience and imperfections. A drawing starts as a piece of paper folded in his bag or pocket, producing an irregular shape, layered with graphite and coloured pencil. The paintings are characteristically handmade objects, roughly painted and asymmetric, with angular lines and varying textures, yet they are balanced by curves and soft colours that fade into the harsher greens and browns. The outcome is refreshingly incomplete, creating an overwhelming sense of calm.

Canadian artist Andrew Salgado and Beers gallery announces his most confident work to date, The Snake. Following ten sell-out solo shows which have taken place in major cities all over the world, Salgado explains that the title refers both to his own sense of re-birth as an artist as well as the allegorical nature the show.

Salgado will exhibit 12 vibrant works as a tribute to the victims of the recent Orlando massacre in Florida, which killed 49 people, making it the largest shooting by a single gunman in American history. As a gay man who subscribes to Francis Bacon’s dictum that it’s not the paintings that are violent, but the world itself, Salgado finds himself once again revisiting themes of brutality and masculinity. Recognisable for his somewhat aggressive, textured brushstrokes and the raw emotion that bleeds from his works, Salgado’s paintings often reference broad ideas around hatred, destruction and re-birth. Previous subjects have included serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, homosexual serial killler as well victims who have had experienced bloodshed and suffering, including Salgado himself. In 2008, at a music festival in Canada, he survived a ferocious attack which left him unconscious and toothless, which was carried out by a handful of men motivated by homophobia.

The demons which lurked around him following the incident have been fully exorcised through a number of cathartic exhibitions. Works such as ‘Bloody Faggot’ (First in 2008 and another version in 2011) were self portraits depicting him blood-encrusted and toothlessly grimacing, post-attack. Eight years later, Salgado has moved on and found peace, with no further need to reference his own sense of violation through his work. He claims though, that the beating has certainly injected a political bent and granted him an unique vantage point to comment on the dark and violent side of humanity. Propelled forwards from being a painter of ‘cute white boys’, and now via the chrysalis of his own catharsis, his paintings and experience have cemented him as an anxious commentator. One who draws allegorical correlations between the predominantly male body and the notions of good and evil.

For the show, Salgado and Beers gallery will create an installation and build a room within a room. The walls will be painted green and a carpet of grass will line the floor, representing the Garden of Eden, with some surprises in store for visitors on the opening night. Salgado claims that there’s a heart of darkness to the works, which isn’t immediately obvious. He says, “I want people to feel like they’re walking into a clandestine space. There’s something evil and seductive about the show as a whole. I feel that as a gay man, we’re pariahs who have been cast out of the Garden of Eden.”

The immersive show will present a paradox of the sacred and the profane, with man’s inhumanity to fellow mankind as the recurring vision. “Orlando was what spurred me on to looking at the ills around the world”, says Salgado. “We’re waking-up every morning to more race-related attacks and assaults based on sexual or religious preferences. We seem to have reached a new low and it just seems to keep going, like we’re trapped in some horrific echo chamber.” This became the title of one of the works. Echo chamber features a portrait of Sandro Kopp, artist and partner of Tilda Swinton. Yet although the subject matter is dark, the paintings themselves are seductively dizzying, their bold colour palette and brushstrokes reverberate, each painting resonating with its own murky depth.

Many of the subjects represent outsiders, each of them an alien or an outcast in some way. They are painted on canvasses which have been and stitched and hand died by the artist. One of the paintings entitled Let’s Start A War depicts Salgado’s first ever Muslim subject, which is embellished with icons and symbols. Female subjects figure will figure strongly in the show, with completed works to include Fiddle and Drum, (named after the Joni Mitchell anti-war song) and Swans, depicting an older woman with short white hair and extremely pale skin, to whom Salgado was drawn by her ethereal and ‘serpentine’ qualities. Additional female subjects confirmed as sitters include model Anna Cleveland and her supermodel mother, Pat Cleveland. The Festival in Hell takes is borrowed from a lyric in a Tori Amos song. The painting is a disturbing vision, a manifestation of the devil, sitting in possibly regretful contemplation of his own reign of destruction. He has given us the powers to ruin ourselves and humanity but even he is shocked at our brutal nihilism.

In many ways, the snake metaphor appealed to Salgado, less as Satanic symbol of chaos from the underworld and more as a symbol of re-birth and healing. The snake may be guilty of causing the transition to human pain, mortality and the expulsion from paradise. But as portrait of existence, our collective suffering is also balanced by the free will, knowledge and joy that comes as part of being human.

Beers gallery will also release a monograph of Andrew Salgado’s work, which will run alongside a show at the Canadian High Commission in London this December.

“Landlords are currently not accepting rent in self love” is a story about coping with the everyday, a tale of precariousness and self-preservation, a play about the loss of communication.
Based on the idea of uncertain co-existence, this exhibition brings together the work of two artists who may or may not share common ground.
A material emphasis on the real and physical is contrasted by an aesthetic more akin to digital environments. A general sense of fluid inter-connectedness of public, domestic and digital environments stands in contrast to a feeling of muteness and uncertainty that underlies everything. We witness a process of dissociation that becomes a metaphor for the fully connected subject.

Self-love,
Self-care.

English/ Swedish artist Henrik Potter lives and works in London. The artist exhibited in group shows ‘Oh, of course, you were berry picking’ DREI Gallery, Köln in 2015 and ‘Down Where Changed’, Cubitt London, in 2014. In 2014 he had a solo show at Palais de Tokyo whilst taking part in group presentations Étrange Été, at Galerie White Project, Paris and in Re-Run #2, and One Thoresby Street, Nottingham all in the same year.

British artist Kate Mackeson lives and works in London. She exhibited her solo exhibition ‘Hygienic Sigh’, at Mars!, Munich, in 2015 with group exhibitions ‘Dirty Wellness’, L’Atelier-KSR, Berlin and ’Sargassum’,at Nat’s Gallery, London. Earlier group projects include ’Grünerløkka Kunstall & Podium’, 2014, Oslo, The Libidinal Net, Heit, Berlin,and The End of The World, Now Now Projects, Glasgow, UK, in 2012.

Francesca von Zedtwitz-Arnim is co-founder and co-curator of the project space MARS! in Munich and a former founding member of Almanac Projects in London.

For The Moves, Leung will present two newly commissioned large scale bodies of work incorporating text, sound and context specific structures. With a background in artists’ moving image discourse, Leung approaches production, exhibition and distribution as interdependent. Based on her experience of formal exhibition and event structures, her work uses this expanded range of material conditions to amplify, distend and fold together the mutual dependency of work and context. Neither medium specific nor conceptually predetermined, Leung's practice is editorial in the most material and rhythmic sense, incorporating breaths, repetitions and cadence. It is this compositional labour of subtraction that spans and meshes her works, doubling holes and constellating fragments, immersive in their evasion, opaque in their transparency. Here the terms of critique are more fluid than oppositional, felt through the skin and in the mouth.

In conjunction with The Moves at Cell Project Space, Leung will present Hollis & Money, an evening of video, readings & music, as well as a new performance conceived for audio podcast and recorded live within the exhibition.

Artist and writer Ghislaine Leung, lives and works in London and Brussels. Recent projects include 078746844 at WIELS, Brussels, Soft Open Shut at Studio Voltaire, Le Bourgeois at 3236rls, Re: Re:, Montague, Brink at CGP, London, Violent Incident, Vleeshal, Middelburg, Prosu(u)mer, EKKM, Tallinn, Performance Capture, Stedelijk, Amsterdam, A Bright Night with Serpentine Galleries and LUX. Recent writings in LA.NL, Amsterdam and Pure Fiction's Dysfiction, Frankfurt. Leung is editor of Versuch Press and member of PUBLIKATIONEN + EDITIONEN. She was resident at Hospitalfield Summer 2016 and has her collection of writing Partners forthcoming in 2017.

Developed with the generous support of The Elephant Trust, Hospitalfield Summer Residency 2016 & WIELS, Brussels.

Chisenhale Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Berlin and Brussels-based artist Peter Wächtler.

Wächtler works across a range of media including sculpture, drawing and animated film, with his writing and prose poems often providing source material. For Wächtler, the introverted experience of labour becomes both his process and his subject.

For his exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Wächtler presents a film made through traditional cel animation, soundtracked by a rock and roll song. The animation depicts the central subject’s departure along a country road, set against a backdrop of moonlit landscapes. The protagonist’s repetitive stasis invokes an ambiguous relationship with acts of progress or withdrawal, as well as our own misplaced desires.

Wandering points to the socio-cultural identity of the âneur, mused on by Baudelaire as “a roving soul in search of a body”, later reintroduced into the academy by Walter Benjamin as a mark of modernity distinctly threatened by developments of an impending Industrial Revolution. Alternately, wilding is a slang word which came into mainstream use in 1980s New York, a dog-whistle term used to describe the gang assault of strangers that rose out of the controversial Central Park jogger case in 1989 wherein ve teenagers of color were accused of and jailed for a crime they did not commit.
In relation to this event “WILDING” was the cover headline of New York’s Daily News on April 22nd, 1989 and became part of the fear-mongering language used to mark the collective socialising of black and brown bodies as inherent public threat and, in turn, justify increased pro ling and policing of such bodies throughout New York City. With ongoing media attention turned to #BlackLivesMatter, a global movement that continues to grow on- line and out in the world in the U.S., U.K., and beyond, the reality of such policing as international phenomena has sparked a much-needed discussion surrounding freedom of movement, as well as race and class tied to the exercising of civil liberties.
Thus “Wandering / WILDING” presents a challenging dichotomy and essential opportunity for discourse, situating a spotlight on the privileged white body that Baudelaire’s “roving soul” has historically inhabited and that American culture has inherited and built into the consciousness of its cultural mythology with the ongoing desire to be “on the road”, the same roads and streets that are not equally carefree nor safe for all bodies that traverse them. What can the Internet do for the black âneur? What freedoms can be found in the “publics” realized via the digital for bodies of color? In what way do artists make new spaces for black lives to matter, online? Wandering / WILDING: Blackness on the Internet and the artists therein aim to inspect, and investigate.

Breather brings together five artists whose work addresses the liminal space that exists between two actions, as thoughts are processed, events connected and a work of art makes the transition from a verb to a noun. Presenting works by Alex Olson, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Sarah Dobai, Brie Ruais and Simone Forti, the exhibition aims to explore this moment of mid-transition through a variety of media, including photography, ceramics, painting and film.

This instant manifests itself in the blink between eyes open/eyes closed and the activation of the ‘mind’s eye’ in the case of Alex Olson. In her diptych she paints the right hand canvas blindly from her memory of the left, veiling and unveiling her vision as she moves between the two. This effort to “see” the same mark from a trace left on the underside of her eyelid acts as a report back from looking inside. In fact, the three paintings on display (all made this year), present a concern for the relationship between the eye and the brain in the intake of physical and semiotic information. In Chart I a textured geometry competes and collaborates for attention with its shadowed counterpart below. Similarly in Return a rectangular shape emerges above, casting light into the spectre of a shape beneath. By switching silhouettes and surfaces in this way, Olson alludes to the ambiguous line that exists between sight and insight as it transitions from material to metaphysical implication.

Alexi-Meskhishvili likewise plays with perception in her photographs, countering the intimacy of the close-up with the distancing devices offered by digital manipulation. By combining digital and analogue technology, the artist alludes to the possibility of a space beyond the flat surface, as she de-contextualises her pictures through the process of layering. Comprised of found images, reworked images and the original negatives themselves, her photographs take on a sculptural quality; they operate between abstraction and reality, in a transitory space that hints at a narrative, but refuses to unfold. Whilst lights and colours serve to abstract and disorientate the compositions, traces of life (flowers and hair) pull reality back in.

In the photographs from Sarah Dobai’s series The Overcoat, the artist explores material desire and the self-reflexive nature of photography as a medium. Taken on a large-format analogue camera and inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, her photographs portray commercial vitrines in London and Paris, all named after the streets and areas (Bond Street, Mile End, Hatton Gardens) that compose them. Principally un-peopled, the photographs consider the displays as a form of vernacular picture making, with the glassed in rectangle of the vitrines referring back to the photographic process itself and the capture of transient reflections connecting subject to medium. As with Alexi-Meskhishvili’s works, Dobai’s choice of windows and approach to photographing them play with the viewer’s perception of surface and depth.

Brie Ruais likewise functions on this threshold, as her works operate on the nexus between ceramics and conceptual art, and embody the transition from action to outcome. In order to make these works, Ruais first sets herself a list of limitations that determine the weight of the clay (often equal to her own bodyweight), the action, the time, and the basic shape, and then confronts the material with her body in a highly physical process, that involves kneeling, kicking, spreading, scraping, skimming…. The resultant ceramics trace the act that brought them into being, with the ephemeral moment forever caught in clay. The works are then cut into tiles, glazed and fired, and titled in a way that describes both method and aesthetic (Spreading Outward from Copper Center). The glazing process operates on a further frontier, bringing the works back to life by colouring them in.

Finally, in Simone Forti’s collaboration with the film-maker Hollis Frampton, Cloths, this instant is given a temporal quality through the choreographed creation and documentation of suspense. For this performance, filmed in 1967, layers of material were flung over a rectangular frame by an invisible puppeteer, in a sequence both comic and hypnotic. This abrupt motion, along with the clumsy splicing together of takes, and flecks of dust puzzling on the surface of the film deny any attempt at a smooth transition, further emphasising the length of the pause between. The simplicity of the gesture captivates the viewer on the cusp of impatience as the new layer cancels out the cloth before it, shifting the colour, pattern and texture of each subsequent view.

Breather thus unites these artists in that illusory moment of disorientation that exists when works are performed into being.

For the publication The Overcoat, 2015, Dobai was commissioned to produce a new series of works to accompany the re-publication of Russian author Nicolai Gogol’s story The Overcoat (1842), published by Four Corners Books London. In 2016 the bookwork The Copyist was released and published by Everyday Press.

Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California), lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011.

Forti is a key figure of 1960s minimalist dance, examining the relationship of space and the body. She emigrated to the US with her family in 1939. In 1955, Forti started dancing with Anna Halprin, a pioneer in improvisation and working with kinesthetic awareness. In 1959, she moved to New York to study composition at Merce Cunningham Studio with musicologist and dance educator Robert Dunn, where she met and began to work informally with choreographers Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton.

Forti collaborated with artists and composers, including Robert Morris, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, Robert Whitman, Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper. In the early 1980s Forti started speaking while moving, working with newspapers and doing solo performances called “News Animations,” giving expression to images, memories and speculations sparked by the news media. Forti has published several books, among them Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, Halifax 1974) and Oh, Tongue!, edited and published by Fred Dewey (Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles 2003). Her works and performances were presented in exhibitions and museums in the US and internationally, most recently at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art New York, Guggenheim Museum, Sao Paulo Biennale and Louvre Paris.

During its short life from 1953 to 1968, The Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm) in Southern Germany pioneered an interdisciplinary and systematic approach to design education – known as the Ulm Model – that was to become universal. This is the first exhibition in the UK to represent the achievements of the School, including the foundation work in drawings and models by the students and the radical designs famously commissioned from the School by corporate clients such as Braun and Lufthansa.

From radiographs and weighing machines to traffic lights, petrol cans, bed frames and kitchenware, the exhibition will gather and correlate objects designed for diverse industries at HfG Ulm. Braun GmbH is providing the exhibition with the last remaining units of their iconic D55 display structure, designed at the School in 1955 to exhibit its modernist reinvention of Braun’s audio sets.

On the face of it, the HfG Ulm had little to do with art. Design work was mostly collectivised and rationalised, the idea of the designer as intuitive ‘artist' emphatically rejected, and the designer's role understood as only one amongst the many specialisms of industrial production. But this exhibition suggests that the School continued the projects of the artistic avant-gardes, especially Constructivism, in that objects were systematically designed to project ideal social relations.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Kapos. Its display furniture is designed by David Kohn Architects.

In the eyes of Fabio Lattanzi, the 2008 financial crisis is like witnessing the collapse of an empire, a chronicle of a fortold tragedy described through the abstraction of numbers and stock values.

In his first solo exhibition in the UK, Fabio Lattanzi crafts together financial mass data archives, an opera singer and complex financial algorithms into a feast of orchestrated requiems. Using traditional screen printing combined with sensory technology, the artist creates objects that reinterpret historical and everyday moments from the stock market records into a musical and poetic manifestation, inviting the audience into a bodily and sonar experience.

SPACE is committed to supporting artist development by working closely with four artists, or collectives, each year to commission new works. The programme champions emerging practice and experimental artist-led initiatives that encourage exchange between the gallery and our Mare Street neighbourhood.
The commissions aim to continually consider the historical and current context of Hackney. While maintaining rigorous, challenging content these attentive, engaging practices offer the opportunity for new encounters between artist, site, artwork and the public.
Each commissioned project includes a solo exhibition and off-site interventions, presented with contextual critical writing, workshops, events and discussions.
SPACE proudly presents its 2016-17 exhibition programme featuring upcoming commissioned projects by:
Dominic Watson (b. Sunderland, based in Amsterdam)
Laura Wilson (b. Belfast, based in London)
Jonathan Baldock (b. Pembury, based in London)

The collaborative exhibition, Razzle Dazzle takes as its starting point Dazzle Camouflage, credited to artist Norman Wilkinson where, ‘military vessels were painted with strong geometric patterns and bold contrasting colouration so as to misinform U-boat captains bent on attack. The intention was optical deception: to mislead the eye and manipulate visual perception.’ (Gil McElroy, The Uses of Abstraction)

Artists Craig Fisher, Louisa Chambers and Rob Flint each employ pattern within their practice as a form of pictorial disruption, interruption and spatial collapse. Initially to start the dialogue each artist will work site-specifically by making work directly on the gallery walls. Over the duration of the exhibition each artist will develop work by responding to the space and each other; artworks will butt up against each other, they may be shown on top of each other making individual practices both indistinguishable and jarring. As the space begins to evolve, as well as adding, interjections will be made where artworks will be removed or displaced. The artists are interested in further crossovers, which will be made during a marked time frame, the possibilities of pattern disruptions and figure/ground painting relationships within the gallery space.

Works in the exhibition will be concealed within the overall dazzle effect of the installation producing interesting juxtapositions and correlations.

The exhibition follows on from a public residency at the Harley Gallery in the East Midlands.